Contest Submissions
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The annual BLR Prizes award outstanding writing related to themes of health, healing, illness, the mind, and the body.
2027 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction Judged by Daniel Mason
2027 Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction, Judged by Meghan O'Rourke
2027 John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry, Judged by Natalie Diaz
See below for more about our judges.
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BLR Prize Guidelines:
- Deadline: July 1, 2026 (11:59 p.m. EST)
- First prize in each genre is $1,000 and publication in the Spring 2027 issue of BLR. Honorable mention winners will receive $300 and publication in the Spring 2027 issue of BLR.
- Do not put your name or other identifying information on the manuscript document (or in the filename). Manuscripts are read blindly by reviewers, editors, and judges.
- Fiction / nonfiction maximum word count is 5,000. You may submit up to 3 poems in one poetry submission. Please see below for additional genre-specific guidelines.
- Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but we ask that you notify us immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere. We regret that there can be no refunds or substitutions for withdrawn work.
- All contest entries will also be considered for regular publication. If you submit to the contest, there is no need to submit the same piece again under the general submissions category.
- Students/friends/colleagues/relations of a judge are not permitted to enter submissions to that judge's genre.
- Work previously published in print or electronically will not be considered. For BLR, “published work” means published in print in North America, or published on the Internet in electronic journals, e-zines, academic websites, and other “public” or “official” websites. Works posted on personal blogs or websites will be considered on a case-by-case basis. We ask that authors be honest about web postings. (If a work is discovered to have been posted or published elsewhere—and not openly acknowledged by the author in advance—we will remove it from consideration.
- By submitting, authors affirm that the work being submitted is their own original writing, has not been previously published, and was not created or materially shaped by generative artificial intelligence tools.
- BLR acquires first-time North American rights, and the right to reprint in anthologies. After publication, all other rights revert to the author and the work may be reprinted as long as appropriate acknowledgement to BLR is made.
- Contest winners are usually announced in November. Decisions for the rest of Issue 52 (to be published in Spring 2027) will be made by the end of the year.
Additional guidelines by genre:
FICTION: Bellevue Literary Review seeks character-driven fiction with original voices and strong settings. We do not publish genre fiction (romance, sci-fi, horror). Most of our published stories tend to be in the range of 2,000-4,000 words. We have only occasionally published flash fiction. While we are always interested in creative explorations in style, we do lean toward classic short stories. (Maximum word count: 5,000)
NONFICTION: We are looking for essays that reach beyond the standard ‘illness narrative’ to develop a topic in an engaging and original manner. Incorporate anecdotes that feel alive, and dazzle us with thoughtful and creative analysis that allows these anecdotes to serve a larger purpose. Please note that we do not publish graphic narratives, academic discourses, or works with footnotes. (Maximum word count: 5,000)
POETRY: We encourage poems that are accessible to a wide audience. Characteristics we look for are vivid writing, strong narrative, and rendering the familiar new. We encourage you to peruse back issues in our archive to get a sense of our ethos. You may submit up to three poems per submission (include all three in one file).
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2027 BLR Prize Judges:
2027 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction Judged by Daniel Mason
Daniel Mason is an associate professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, and author of works including A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; North Woods, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Country People (2026).
2027 Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction, Judged by Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the best-selling memoir The Long Goodbye. Her most recent book of poems, Sun In Days, was named a Top Ten Poetry Book of the Year by the New York Times; her debut Halflife was a finalist for Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, and a Front Page award, she is a professor of creative writing at Yale University and the executive editor of The Yale Review.
2027 John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry, Judged by Natalie Diaz
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She is the author of two poetry collections, Post-Colonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020), winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press 2012). Diaz is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University where she directs ASU’s Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.
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We encourage you to read BLR before you submit. Samples from each issue are available on our website.
We're happy to offer a 50% subscription discount to all authors who participate in the contest. (If you live outside the US, you must select the International option. Otherwise, we'll be unable to ship the journal to you. Thanks!)